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Colombia: the new killings

A supporter of the peace deal with rebels of the FARC argues with an opponent in downtown Bogotá. Thursday, Nov. 24, 2016. AP Photo/Ivan Valencia.

For almost 90 days, only one armed incident between the army and
the FARC has been reported. But according to an investigation by La Silla Vacía, 20 rural leaders have
been killed, one by one – six of them, members of the Patriotic March Party.

"They are repeating the dose," says with macabre
humour its president, Aída Avella, a survivor of the extermination of 3.000
members of the Patriotic Union 30 years ago.

The killings have increased since October 2, when the No won at the
plebiscite. But they began way back, when the peace talks with the FARC got
under way. Every progress in the Havana agreements was matched with a death
toll in the Colombian fields: regional and communal leaders, human rights
activists, victims’ and displaced people’s lawyers (105 last year), and many
members of the Communist Party and the Patriotic March (124 in the last four
years).

Who kills them? No one knows. Hitmen on motorcycles.
But in today's rural Colombia everyone rides a motorcycle, both the murderers
and the murdered, and there are plenty of would-be assassins in a demoralized population
after 50 years of dirty war.

Who orders the killings? The "dark
forces", President Virgilio Barco said, undaunted, 30 years ago – though
he did not bother to explain who they were. And that is the reason why they
grew. The then minister of his cabinet and future president César Gaviria
counted more than 50 "dark" organizations, which began to be called
"narco-paramilitaries": narco,
because they were partners with the drug traffickers, and paramilitaries because they acted in a mutual-aid agreement with the
military. Many years later, the names of some gang leaders began to be known:
Castaño, Mancuso, Báez, Tovar Pupo… Some were extradited to the United
States by Álvaro Uribe’s government, to be tried there for drug smuggling – and
not in Colombia for the killings in the rural areas. Others were thrown into
Colombian jails and revealed some of the names of their partners in the Armed
Forces – the most notorious of them General Rito Alejo del Río, and some of his
friends in Congress, assembly members, governors and mayors: the parapoliticians, some of which also went
to prison, after duly voting the government’s projects, as requested by Uribe.

Now, it is the same story all over again. The perpetrators of
this new wave of crimes are probably the same "dark forces" which
have not stopped proceeding in the same way under different names. They are no
longer called narco-paramilitaries, but "bacrim" – that is, criminal
bands: Black Eagles, Urabeños, Stubbles, Vichada Liberators,
the Anti-land restitution Army. Their
criminal structures, though, remain the same. And they are financed by the same
old landowners of 30 years ago, and also the new ones who in the last 30 years
have become rich exploiting the land which had been seized from hundreds of
thousands of rural families – the people that the supporters of No at the
plebiscite (former president Uribe and his “little eggs”, i.e. the Fedegan
ranchers, former attorney and presidential candidate Ordóñez) cynically call
“the bearers of good faith". For although they can no longer deny that people
were despoiled from their land (Uribe's advisor José Obdulio Gaviría simply
called them “internal migrants”), they keep on denying that there were any
despoilers. They
do not want to give back graciously what they got through unfair means.

If Juan Manuel Santos’s government, which after much effort has
just signed a peace agreement with the FARC guerrillas for the third time, does
not take the situation firmly in hand; if it does not seriously investigate who
the leaders of the new killings are; if it does not find out whether they now have,
again, the complicity of military chiefs, political leaders, notaries, and local
authorities; and if it does not pursue them accordingly, the three-time signed peace
will only last as much as a speech.

This article was previously published by Lalineadefuego.